平本成海、吉村泰英

Narumi Hiramoto, Yasuhide Yoshimura

The most basic commonplace preceding any artistic expressions, i.e. the "ordinariness" of everyday as degree zero of art, has been regarded as the quintessence of photography as well as its ultimate end. Since 2020, however, the Covid 19 disease has taught us that this basic commonplace is in reality a very fragile one, which has collapsed easily and undramatically. Locked up in the house, we have been forced to face our own everyday life. The environment that had held us unconsciously has turned into an uncomfortable straitjacket and our days of ordinariness are gone somewhere, whilst the persistent disease has not reached a status of new ordinariness. Now, the ordinary everyday life offers us nothing but a feeling of alienation because nothing has remained "as it is" any more.
To its 10th anniversary, the showcase is pleased to exhibit two artists who will correspond to our present situation.
Narumi Hiramoto (b.1984) won the grand prix of the 20th "1_WALL" award in 2019. Hiramoto is also known as Yusaku Yamazaki, who participated in 2015 the showcase#4 "construct". How these two artistic personae coexist in a single person is something only Hiramoto=Yamazaki would know, however from their works we could say that the former makes pictures without photographing the world, while the latter photographs it in order to make pictures. Starting from the recognition that our everyday world is made up with photographs, Hiramoto cuts out photographs from local newspapers, just as in Thomas Ruff's "Zeitungsfoto"-series, in order to set the photographs free from their original contexts. He then manipulates them into oddly alienated images of everyday world, which are to be uploaded to SNS. Like On Kawara's "date paintings", this procedure has to be accomplished by the end of the day. As Corona-infected persons are secluded from our view and as the radiant form of the Corona-virus is just an electron-microscopic image, the Covid 19 disease cannot be properly photographed and remains concealed. How, then, do Hiramoto's alienating collages correspond to our present situation alienated in the Corona-restrictions?
Yasuhide Yoshimura (b.1993. https://yasuhideyoshimura.com/）won the excellent award in the Canon New Century of Photography Award 2020. For the showcase#10 the new face presents the awarded series "Horseshoe". In an ordinary, pretty prefabricated house, the ordinary "I" and the ordinary "she" are performing their "ordinary days", so ordinary that there are hardly any ups and downs but their dog's and rabbit's death. Though a horseshoe is a Western symbol of luck, Yoshimura's photographs accumulate sediment of subtle alienation and uncanniness, instead of telling the moral of the bluebird that the luck is to be rediscovered in the ordinary daily life. 　The artist makes his living as a social worker at a supporting facility for the intellectually disabled, where in fact diverse worlds of ordinariness collide each other. Days of diversity affirm the plurality and hence fragility of the very commonplace, both of which are matrices of his photographs.